In most areas of the world, especially in the temperate regions, there is a limited growing season for most agricultural crops. During the time of the year in which any given crop cannot be grown in a particular area, consumption of that crop must be foregone or supplies of that crop must be imported from other areas. Doing without a particularly desirable crop is usually an unsatisfactory alternative. Importing a crop from other regions also has drawbacks. For instance, importing a crop involves transportation costs which increase the final cost to consumers over that which would be the case if the crop could be grown locally. Importing of crops during the off-season almost always involves transporting them over long distances, which involves a long period of time between harvest and consumption. To avoid spoilage, this period of time necessary for transporting tee crop to where it is to be consumed requires that the crop be harvested before it has had a chance to ripen sufficiently. This procedure of harvesting a crop before it has had a chance to fully ripen usually causes the flavor and other sensory characteristics of the final product to be substantially less desirable than they might have been had the harvest taken place when the crop was fully ripened and had the crop been consumed shortly after harvest. Crops grown in distant places and transported to areas unable to grow that crop are thus not as desirable as those grown close to where they are consumed.
Growing crops in controlled environments, such as greenhouses, in the off-season has been used in an attempt to provide desirable crops during non-growing seasons. Efforts to date have been frustrated by the fact that producing crops in a greenhouse environment is an expensive proposition relative to producing those crops outdoors in the usual manner. Increased expenses are due to costly equipment needed to control the environment in which the crops are grown and the intensive labor required in tending the crops and harvesting them. It is, therefore, imperative that the greenhouse be operated in a most efficient manner for the production of greenhouse grown crops to be accomplished in a commercially viable manner.
Commercial greenhouse crop production will be more viable only if it is possible to accurately predict crop yields, if it is possible to produce crops with a predictable yield on a continuous basis for predetermined extended periods of time, and if it is possible to utilize greenhouse space in the most efficient manner possible. To date, these aims have not been achieved in a satisfactory manner so that, for the most part, consumers have had to forego the consumption of certain crops during the off-season or they had to endure the consumption of crops having undesirable qualities grown far away during the off-season.
There have been many attempts to automate the control of the greenhouse environment. None of those attempts addressed effectively the problems of continuous, predictable yield and efficient utilization of greenhouse space. Thus, prior efforts have been unable to provide a commercially viable greenhouse crop production system.
A paper by Giniger and McAvoy, entitled "Computer Simulation of a Single Cluster Tomato Cropping System", presented at the Aug. 3-6, 1986 meeting of the American Society of Agricultural Engineers purports to deal with the need for continuous, predictable yields of tomatoes produced in a greenhouse and the need for efficient allocation of space in the greenhouse growing system for a single cluster tomato cropping system. The paper says that a computer simulation growth model was developed which sets up a growing schedule that results in continuous, predictable crop yield and optimized greenhouse space utilization. There is no computer hardware, flow chart, or computer software disclosed in the paper relating to the computer simulation growth model. There is insufficient information given in the paper for any of this to be developed. Accordingly, not enough information is given in the paper which will enable a person skilled in the art to make the computer model mentioned in the paper or to make another apparatus capable of achieving the aims mentioned in the paper. Moreover, some of the information said by the paper to be needed to achieve those aims have been found by the inventors not to produce the desired result of continuous, predictable yield and optimized greenhouse space utilization. For example, the paper describes an incorrect relationship between the amount of available light and the number of days from emergence to first flowering in tomato plants.
Accordingly, it is an object of the invention to overcome the problems experienced in the past in connection with growing crops in a controlled environment which hindered the growing of such crops in a commercially viable manner.
It is also an object of the invention to economically produce crops in regions where the weather conditions are not suitable for growing such crops.
It is a specific object of the invention to provide an apparatus and method which instruct the grower how to achieve economical production of crops grown in a controlled environment on a continuous and predictable basis.
It is a further object of the invention to provide an apparatus and method which instruct the grower about how to achieve efficient space allocation in a controlled environment, such as a greenhouse.
It is an additional object of the invention to provide an apparatus and method which are able to schedule the planting of crops in a greenhouse so that they are harvested on desired dates.
It is also an object of the invention to provide an apparatus and method which predict the yield of crops grown in a greenhouse.
Other objects and advantages of the invention are either specifically described elsewhere in this application or are apparent from that description.